No Country for Women - Humanism, Secularism, Feminism

Taslima Nasreen

Taslima Nasreen, an award-winning writer, physician, secular humanist and human rights activist, is known for her powerful writings on women oppression and unflinching criticism of religion, despite forced exile and multiple fatwas calling for her death. In India, Bangladesh and abroad, Nasreen’s fiction, nonfiction, poetry and memoir have topped the best-seller’s list.

Taslima Nasreen was born in Bangladesh. She started writing when she was 13. Her writings won the hearts of people across the border and she landed with the prestigious literary award Ananda from India in 1992. Taslima won The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought from the European Parliament in 1994. She received the Kurt Tucholsky Award from Swedish PEN, the Simone de Beauvoir Award and Human Rights Award from Government of France, Le Prix de l' Edit de Nantes from the city of Nantes, France, Academy prize from the Royal Academy of arts, science and literature from Belgium. She is a Humanist Laureate in The International Academy for Humanism,USA. She won Distinguished Humanist Award from International Humanist and Ethical Union, Free-thought Heroine award from Freedom From Religion foundation, USA., IBKA award, Germany,and Feminist Press Award, USA . She got the UNESCO Madanjeet Singh prize for Promotion of the Tolerance and Non-violence in 2005. She received the Medal of honor of Lyon. She got honorary citizenship from Paris, Nantes, Lyon, Metz, Thionville, Esch etc. Taslima was awarded the Condorcet-Aron Prize at the “Parliament of the French Community of Belgium” in Brussels and Ananda literary award again in 2000.

Bestowed with honorary doctorates from Gent University and UCL in Belgium, and American University of Paris and Paris Diderot University in France, she has addressed gatherings in major venues of the world like the European Parliament, National Assembly of France, Universities of Sorbonne, Oxford, Harvard, Yale, etc. She got fellowships as a research scholar at Harvard and New York Universities. She was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow in the USA in 2009.

Taslima has written 40 books in Bengali, which includes poetry, essays, novels and autobiography series. Her works have been translated in thirty different languages. Some of her books are banned in Bangladesh. Because of her thoughts and ideas she has been banned, blacklisted and banished from Bengal, both from Bangladesh and West Bengal part of India. She has been prevented by the authorities from returning to her country since 1994, and to West Bengal since 2007.

EVENTS

Peter Kassig was converted to Islam and became Abdul Rahman. But he was still slaughtered by crazy killers from Islamic State. Peter Kassig did not know before converting that Islam was not a religion of peace. Or he knew it but he did it for survival. Most of the Western prisoners were converted to Islam. But it didn’t help. ISIS killers kill Muslims too.

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A couple was beheaded in cold blood by the family of the girl over love marriage in Satrah village, on Friday.

According to the FIR lodged with Satrah police station, Sajjad Ahmed, 27, of village Hasanabad, Sialkot, had contracted a love marriage with Muafia Bibi, 23, of Satrah on June 18.

On Friday, seven members of Muafia’s family, including her father Dilshad alias Kulla, uncle Ghulam Husain, Shamshad, Afzaal Husain and Bashiran Bibi, stormed into house of the newly-weds in Hasanabad, bundled them into a van and took them to an outhouse at Satrah.

The suspects tied up the legs and arms of Sajjad and Muafia and cut off their heads with choppers in public but nobody dared stop them.

Villagers found the girls’ bodies hanging from a tree on Wednesday morning, hours after they disappeared from fields near their home in Katra village in Uttar Pradesh state.
The girls, who were 14 and 15, had gone into the fields because there was no toilet in their home.
Hundreds of angry villagers spent the rest of Wednesday in silent protest over alleged police inaction in the case.
Indian TV channels showed video of the villagers sitting under the girls’ bodies as they swung in the wind, preventing authorities from taking them down from the tree until the suspects were arrested.
Police arrested the three men later in the day and were searching for four more suspects.

Autopsies confirmed the girls had been gang-raped and strangled before being hanged, police said.
The villagers accused the chief of the local police station of ignoring a complaint by the girls’ father on Tuesday night that the girls were missing.
The station chief has since been suspended.
The family belongs to the Dalit community, also called “untouchables” and considered the lowest rung in India’s age-old caste system.
India tightened its anti-rape laws last year, making gang rape punishable by the death penalty.
Records show a rape is committed every 22 minutes in India, a nation of 1.2 billion people.
Activists say that number is low because of an entrenched culture of tolerance for sexual violence, which leads many cases to go unreported.

I don’t get surprised anymore. Men are the most cruelest, nastiest, filthiest immoral creatures on earth. Men hate women. They can do anything against women. They can murder all women. They can make all women extinct.

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I was reading today’s news about how a doctor woman was killed by her doctor husband in Pittsburgh. I was thinking how they lived their family life in their nice beautiful house, whether they woke up in the morning and said good morning to each other, and then had breakfast together, whether they used to go to parties, theaters, vacations together, come home, watch TV, make love! What kind of life a couple could live when one planned to murder the other one? I imagined Dr Robert Ferrante as my husband. I told him about my happiness and sorrows, about my childhood and my youth, and about my love and my dreams, he listened to me and planned to kill me, I was cooking the food he liked and I was serving him dinner every night, while he was sitting on a dinning chair planning to poison me. I was passionately making love to him while he was planning to eliminate me. And one day he finally murdered me.

It does not happen only in Pittsburgh in the USA, it happens in Pirozpore in Bangladesh, in St. Petersburg in Russia, in Porto Novo in Benin, in Piteå in Sweden as well.

The dinosaur told me “Extinction
Is the safest, conservative bet”
The dinosaur told me “don’t think you’re immune
Just because it has not happened yet.”

The dinosaur gave me a warning
She told me to share it with you
It won’t be an asteroid this time around—
We’ll be killed by the things that we do

The dinosaur pointed to history
And biology books on the shelves
The dinosaur told me what’s different this time
Is, we’re doing it all by ourselves

The dinosaur told me “be careful”
The dinosaur told me “it’s true”
The dinosaur said, “it’s a fight to the death,
And the enemy this time… is you.”
*

Cuttlefish is right. We are our own worst enemy. We are killing innocent animals, destroying the environment, we are cheating on ourselves, we are gangraping and murdering almost everything we have found on the planet. As a species, we are, no doubt, are the cruelest, the most vicious!

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I cried and cried while listening to your Soweto blues. I was far away from South Africa but your song brought me to South Western Townships. It was June 16, 1976. 20,000 black students started a protest against the Apartheid government’s decision to force them to use Afrikaans, the language of the oppressor , as a language of instruction. The police shot them. 200 protesters were killed, many people were wounded.

It reminds me of February 21, 1952. Bengali people in East Pakistan protested against the decision of the West Pakistani rulers to force them to learn Urdu, the language of the oppressor and to make Urdu, not Bengali, the state language. The police shot them. Many protesters were killed and wounded.

Miss you Miriam Makeba! Happy Birthday!

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There is a secular uprising in Bangladesh. Hundreds of thousands of people are demanding death penalty for the war criminal Islamists, and the banning of Jamaat-e-Islami, the political party of the Islamic terrirists.

Delawar Hossain Sayedee, one of the most notorious criminals belonging to Jamaat-e-Islami, was handed a death sentence by the International war criminal tribunals, after almost a month of non-stop protests against the war criminals at Shahbag. After the verdict was issued, Sayedee’s Islamist followers vandalised cities, burned down Hindu and Buddhist temples, terrorized the whole country, killed innocent people. There is no doubt that in today’s Bangladesh, the Islamists are much more powerful and ferocious than ever.